行く春や重たき琵琶の抱き心 Yuku haru ya Omotaki biwa no daki kokoro The passing spring! The heart of one holding a heavy lute in their arms. In the book "Buson to Kanshi" (Buson and Chinese Poetry) the author, Narushima Yukio, argues that this haiku is an allusion to a poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Changling entitled "Spring Melancholy at the Western Palace." Cheryl Crowley in her book "Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Bashō Revival" also notes this allusion and gives this translation of the Chinese poem: In the quiet night of the Western Palace, a hundred flowers are fragrant I thought to roll up the jeweled blinds, but I pass the spring night in sorrow With a pipa leaning in my arms, I gaze at the moon. Zhaoyang is hidden in trees that are colored in pale, pale light. The allusion brings out Buson's sense of loss with the passing of spring. The kigo of "Yuku haru" means the time period of when spring is near its end. The high humidity of summer begins when the rainy season ends and the hot tropical weather begins, with this clear demarkation between the two seasons, it's easy to have feelings of regret and sorrow when coming to grips with the fact of having to deal the soon to be here sweltering heat. Feelings that can be similar to a royal courtesan or consort that is facing the reality of having had fallen out of favor with the royal nobility that has put her in their palaces. And, or course, Wang Changling could have been writing about long pangs that follow the acceptance that one's love has been in vain or death has taken it away, given whatever situation that he was writing about. Putting the allusion aside, the image of a "heavy lute" has added a personal resonance for me because I do find the rainy season to be gloomy at times, especially if the intermittent showers and low grey cloudiness of the season lasts for more than three or four days without ever clearing up. The word "omotai" in Japanese can be translated as "gloomy of depressing" besides "heavy", so I tend to read this haiku as being about the mental state I tend to find myself in at times when spring is nearing the end. There is a translation mistake in the picture I included with this post. The women here is holding a zither, but in the poem the word "pipa" means lute and not that. The Chinese word of "pipa" and the Japanese word of "biwa" have the same Chinese character so it's hard to understand the miss here. The Japanese biwa is associated with the songs sung about the Heike Monogatari, which is a tale about how the cultured ruling class is routed out of power by a clan that is less cultured in the arts, which leads into another reading of this being a metaphor of the singer lamented the passing spring the way the biwa traditionally laments the passing of the Taira clan. It's up to you to decide if you want to read in the allusion or not!
The Haiku Experiment 